Warrior Without a Cause

by Nancy Gideon

  Not up to the standard set by Barbara D'Angelo.

  "He was a fool," Jack summed up flatly. "And he must have been blind not to see you for the jewel you are."

  She shrugged, not really believing him, still unable to see herself through Jack's eyes. Her injured pride, her hurt feelings weren't the important thing, not when faced with one more monumental conflict.

  "He may have been a bad father but I always thought he was a good man. I believed in his work. I believed in his commitment to the truth, to justice, and I made those things my goals, too. What if I was wrong, Jack? His secrecy, the bank account, his relationship with Allen, his death. What if everything I believed about him was a lie?"

  "What if he was just a man after all? Is that what you're afraid of finding out?"

  She faced him and faced that question with a heartbreaking honesty. "Maybe it is."

  She could devote herself wholeheartedly to the symbol of saintly goodness she'd held her father up to be. Had she been so disappointed in the real man, the man that hurt her continually with his rejection of her love, of her skills, of her worth, that she'd created one of untarnishable integrity so that she could adore and follow? One she could admire for his works because he was so lacking in true character?

  "Tessa, you can't base your value according to his scales. They weren't fair. There's no way you could ever get them to balance out. Stop trying. You've given him your entire past. Don't give him your future, too. If you want to finish this, do it for the right reason. Because a crime's been committed. Because a wrong's been done. Not to prove something to a man you could never please. You don't owe him anything. He's not worth it, Tess. He's not worth your life."

  "He was all I had, Jack."

  "But he's not all that you are. He's not all that you can become. Don't you see that? How can you not see that?"

  "Because no one's ever told me before."

  He was silent for a moment. "I'm telling you now. And remember, you promised to listen to me."

  His sudden grin cut through the block of anguish encasing her heart. In a single, gulping breath, it fell away, leaving an uncertain sense of freedom. She inhaled deeply, cautiously, testing the unrestrained boundaries. And it felt good.

  He was watching her expression carefully, waiting for that moment of realization to come. And when it did, he smiled in satisfaction.

  "Good girl."

  She put her hands over his, not clutching, just layering gently over them. He went still.

  "What am I going to do, Jack?" she asked quietly, not looking to him for an answer but for a direction.

  "What do you want to do?"

  "I want to do the right thing. I want to find out who killed my father and why. And then I want to walk away from it and not look hack."

  His hands turned, capturing hers in a firm crush. "You're a tough woman, Tessa D'Angelo. You'll do fine."

  Yes, she would. The bud of encouragement took root deep and strong, promising a determined growth. All she needed was a little care. That's all she'd ever needed but she'd always been afraid to ask. Until now. Until she had so much to risk and so much to gain.

  "Will you help me, Jack?"

  There was a short pause, long enough for her to know that he'd considered the question carefully. Then his reply came sure and unwavering.

  "Yes, I will."

  Her breath expelled in a soul-cleansing rush and with it her weighty burden of guilt. If her father had done something wrong, she could face it. With Jack's support, she would face it and move on. What Jack hadn't said was that he'd be there for that next step, too.

  Suddenly overwhelmed by weariness, she let her shoulders droop and her head hang low. She slipped her hands free of his to rub them over her face and through her hair. And when his palm cupped the back of her head, she didn't resist the pull that brought her to his shoulder. She rested there, safe enough to drop all defenses and linger.

  "You're all right, Tess," he murmured against her hair. "You don't need anyone's approval but your own."

  If that were true, why did it seem so vital to win his?

  But then, she realized with some surprise, she already had it. Despite his gruffness, despite his cynicism, she'd always felt his admiration for who she was if not for what she was doing. She didn't need to do anything to earn it. It was just there. The concept humbled her—that something so frantically sought all her life like a personal Holy Grail was just there with no strings attached.

  Who was this amazing man?

  "Thank you, Jack."

  She could feel his hesitation, then his slight smile. "Just part of the services I offer."

  She smiled, too. "Somehow I doubt that."

  She lifted her head and leaned back just far enough to see him. In the firelight, his gaze was dark liquid heat. As she held his stare and the complexities of their relationship resurfaced, she could see the protective shuttering begin behind his immobile expression.

  Oh, no you don't, Jack Chaney. You're not going to wiggle out of this so easily.

  She touched her fingertips to one taut, swarthy cheek, letting them stroke lightly along his fierce jaw. Muscles jumped beneath that slow caress but his gaze never flickered. It burned into hers, igniting her desire like raw oxygen touched by flame. It sucked the air from her lungs until she was starved for the taste of him as if it were her next breath. It made her light-headed. She went after what she needed to survive.

  Slow and sweet, the kiss fueled her, feeding a flash fire of want and a deeper, smoldering sense of satisfaction.

  Oh, but he could kiss. He teased her with a game of advance and retreat, with the pressure of his mouth, with the part of his lips, with the touch of his tongue until she was mad for more.

  "You promised me hours and hours," she whispered into their next shared breath.

  "Yes, ma'am. I did." With her face bracketed between his big hands, he looked at her for a long moment. His stare devoured her. "That's a promise I'll enjoy keeping."

  He unwrapped the bearskin rug from around her and, with a flip, cast it down on the hardwood floor in front of the hearth. He arched a black brow in question. Catching his meaning, she smiled.

  The fur was softer than she'd expected and warmed quickly to the heat of the fire. She stretched out over it on her back while Jack spooned in next to her on his side. Before dinner she'd showered and changed from the rumpled suit into cozy knit pants and a plush chenille turtleneck the same color blue as her eyes. Jack's hand slipped under the hem of the sweater to rest hot and heavy on her midriff, letting it ride the rise and fall of her breathing as it increased with a roller-coaster intensity. He rolled toward her, claiming another will-warping kiss. He'd put on a navy-blue T-shirt that left his bronzed forearms bare. Her palm moved restlessly along the hard length of one of them. Such lethal power restrained into a tender touch. She sighed against his searching lips as he traced the lacy whorls on her bra with his thumb.

  "Woman, you have the sexiest underwear," he murmured. "What color is it?"

  "See for yourself."

  He had the sweater over her head in a pulse beat. Her bra was powder blue, like the soft chenille, like the softer glow in her uplifted gaze. She trailed her forefinger down the warmed cotton of his T-shirt.

  "And how about those boxers? That's a fashion statement I didn't expect from a guy like you."

  "A man looks for all the freedom he can get."

  "Then why don't you loosen up a little bit more."

  She hadn't seen him naked yet and the suspense was killing her.

  He sat up to strip off his shirt. His upper body was breathtakingly defined by browned skin over dangerous muscle. On his left shoulder was a small tattoo. A howling wolf's head framed by a full moon.

  Lone Wolf.

  Not tonight.

  He got up onto his knees to undo his jeans and push them down, revealing those boxers she found so outrageously appealing, then sat to skin the denim from his long, athletic legs. He'd been barefoot already
. He was so gorgeous, it hurt just looking at him. A dark pirate, a sleek, cunning warrior out to capture her body and to demand the surrender of her soul as his reward.

  He had it. With one scorching look, he had all of her.

  He sank back onto her lips, feasting there as if he'd hungered for a lifetime. Perhaps he had. She only knew that nothing had filled her so completely as the way he consumed her with a gaze and set her free to experience all he would give. If only for the night.

  He lifted up and smiled slyly. Hooking a thumb beneath the elastic band of her pants, he pulled them away from her taut belly.

  "Are the panties blue, too?"

  She raised her hips. "Help yourself."

  "Don't mind if I do."

  He peeled down the snug knit and tugged off her bulky socks, leaving hare skin and nearly bare blue lace. As he traced the line of her scanty bottoms, her abdomen quivered.

  "Now I know what they mean by less is more."

  "And less than that is better still."

  "No argument here."

  He bent to press a hot kiss upon the small triangle of lace. Spontaneous combustion. She lifted her hips a second time, allowing him to remove the scrap of fabric. Then his mouth pressed upon the small triangle of curls. Tessa's hands fisted in the thick pelt. As he opened the way for a deeper, wildly intimate exploration, her legs began to tremble. That seismic quake centered beneath his attention, rippling along a fault line of intensity until a determined thrust of his tongue tore her asunder. Her body bucked with the tremendous rock and roll of sensation. A definite eight on the Richter scale because it had brought the walls of her inhibitions crashing down in one great earth-moving experience.

  Before the last of the tremors eased away, Jack slid upward, tonguing her navel, up the center of her torso where he flicked open the center clip of her bra then pushed the cups aside. His mouth was molten passion atop the peak of one bared breast and then the other, streaking fire and the exquisite pain of delight straight to her very core.

  She said his name, a low, lusty growl of want and desperate desire. Her hands gripped the sides of his face, dragging him up to meet her greedy kisses. She yanked his boxers down and let her palms roam over the hard contours of his butt, squeezing and kneading to appease the fascination she'd developed during those long runs. Staring him straight in the eye, she murmured, "The clock starts now, Jack."

  "No time like the present."

  He filled her with a strong, sure stroke, letting her know he belonged there with a hard, claiming kiss. And when he began to move, time stood still for Tessa. For hours.

  And hours.

  * * *

  "Too. You said 'too.' What did you mean by that?"

  Jack squinted one eye open. "What?"

  "When you said you wouldn't have me scarring your soul, too. What did you mean?"

  His eye closed and his expression closed up even tighter. She considered letting it go, letting him keep his secrets. But hadn't she just bared her soul to him … along with a lot more?

  "It has something to do with Rose's mother."

  It was just a guess but she could tell she'd hit pay dirt by the way he tensed by slow degrees. Either he would tell her or he wouldn't. This was a time for truth.

  "What do you know about Esmerelda?" He asked without opening his eyes, without displaying any emotion in either voice or facial expression.

  "Only that Rose said she'd died and that you brought her and her aunt to live with you afterward. Are you Rose's father?"

  "No."

  "But you and her mother were involved." Why else would he have brought the orphaned child back with him?

  "Involved? I guess you could say that. I was in Colombia on a mission. Esmerelda was my contact. Her husband had been in their policia nacional and after his murder, she'd been instrumental in infiltrating a lot of places we couldn't get access to. I mean, who would suspect a widow and her young daughter of passing secrets to foreign government operatives?"

  "Someone did," Tessa concluded softly.

  A pause. "Yeah. Someone did." He stared up at the ceiling, his eyes a flat black, reflecting the firelight, but no sign of inner life. He looked a million miles away. Or at least a continent.

  Hoping to encourage him to continue, Tessa laid her head upon his shoulder as her palm settled on the slow, steady rise and fall of his chest. Automatically his hand touched the back of her head, fingers kneading in a restless motion that told more of his mood than anything else had.

  "She'd set herself up in a village we had under surveillance. It was dangerous but she insisted. She got a job in the local big cheese's house. His was the palm one had to grease to move anything from pot to pigs through the region. She kept track of who came to visit and of insurgent and paramilitary groups that were in the area so we wouldn't be surprised."

  "What were you doing there?"

  "Things you really don't want to know about. Tracking weapons mostly. She would hide me and Russell and a couple of other operatives, feed us food and information. We had a pretty sweet deal going for about five months."

  "Were you in love with her?" Her throat tightened as she asked that. She didn't want to think about him in love with another woman after what they'd just shared even if she was no threat to Tessa because she was no longer a tangible flesh-and-blood rival.

  Or perhaps she was more of one because of it.

  "I should have been. If I had been, maybe she'd still be alive."

  "She was in love with you."

  He didn't deny it.

  "All she could talk about was getting to America where fifty-five percent of the population didn't live below the poverty level, getting a house for Rose and getting her into a real school where she could grow up a happy, normal child and not as a potential casualty of some local or boundary war. She never came right out and asked me if I would take them, but I knew that's what she wanted. I knew that's why she was willing to take the risks she did. She was hoping that when our job was over and we moved on, I would take them with me."

  "But you couldn't."

  "I didn't want to." Jack could have made himself sound less the villain but he didn't. He summed up his own motives with a ruthless candor. "She was my source and it was my job to get information. It couldn't be any more than that, not in my line of work. I liked what I did. I believed in what I did. And I let her believe whatever she wanted."

  He paused, waiting for Tessa to call him a cold, miserable bastard.

  "Did you promise you would take her with you?"

  "No. But I never told her I wouldn't, either. Don't ask, don't tell. It worked for me."

  She was silent for a long time, letting him wonder what she was thinking. He plied her hair absently, winding it through his fingers while he marveled that something so fair, so soft, so fine could also have such tensile strength. But was Tessa strong enough to hear the rest of what burdened his soul?

  "So what happened?" she finally prompted.

  "We knew they suspected her but we kept letting her go back into the compound, to gather the intel we needed. Then one night she didn't come out. Connie, her sister, came instead with news that she'd been arrested and that they were torturing her to get her to tell them who she'd been giving the information to. We were gone, like ghosts, sure she would give us up to save herself."

  "But she didn't."

  He took a deep breath and shook his head, as if the magnitude of her courage, of her sacrifice, still perplexed him. "No, she didn't. After a week of doing what must have been unimaginable things to her, they marched her out into the square and shot her as an example to others who might think to collaborate with the enemy. They shot her like a dog in the street."

  Tessa could see the horror of that moment replaying in his gaze, reflected by the dancing firelight.

  "You couldn't have known that's what they'd do."

  But he didn't take her easy way out to slip his yoke of guilt. "Of course I knew and we just let her make the sacrifice. They sho
t her while Rose and Constanza watched."

  Tessa shut her eyes but, like Jack, couldn't shut out the image. It blended and blurred and became that of her father lying in a pool of his own blood.

  "That night I went back," he continued in the same atonal voice. "I carried Rose and half dragged Constanza out to a landing strip in the jungle. In five minutes we were in the air on the way to the United States. Eight days earlier, Esmerelda could have been flying with us. I let her die, Tess. My mission was more important to me than her life."

  Tessa jumped right by that to something that was more obvious in her eyes. "And your life was more important to her than her own."

  He couldn't respond to that. He'd never known how to respond to that.

  "Does Rose know?"

  He shook his head. "She thinks I'm a hero. I've been too much of a coward to tell her otherwise. I resigned my commission the minute the plane touched down in the States. I called in every favor owed me to get myself declared her guardian. And I made it my mission to see her mother's last wish came true, that Rose would grow up in America, safe and happy."

  "Doesn't that make you a hero?"

  He glanced at her briefly, appearing almost angry that she wasn't holding him in contempt for what he viewed as an unforgivable crime. "Not when weighed against the rest. No job, no cause, was worth the life of that little girl's mother. It was a choice I didn't have the right to make but I made it anyway. And when Rose finds out, she's going to blame me as much as I blame myself."

  Was that why he wouldn't let himself love the child? Was he holding her at arm's length to spare himself the future pain of her hate and scorn?

  "Tell her, Jack. You might be surprised."

  He glanced at her then, his stare stormy and dangerous. "Would you forgive your father so easily if you found out he'd lied to you and paid for the clothes on your back and that enviable law degree with drug money?" He paused, studying Tessa's expression, as if waiting for the expected hurt, denial and finally anger, at him, to settle in. But her stare remained steady, her eyes filled with empathy, not blame. He shrugged. "Drug money, blood money, what's the difference? I can't bring her mother back and there's nothing I can do to give back to Rose what was taken from her."