“I know what it is,” Marly said, then yawned.
Grace stopped in her tracks. “You do?”
The girl nodded. “’S one of those trip wire things we put up. They’re alarmed.”
“Trip wire?”
Marly explained about the security devices Draven had arranged, sounding rather proud of her part in the setup. Grace hadn’t known about that part of it; when Marly had told her they’d set up alarms, she’d not thought of anything that simple.
“I wonder what set it off,” Marly mumbled, clearly still groggy with sleep.
“I don’t know.”
The teenager stood up, gawky and long legged in her rock band T-shirt. “Should we go look?”
Grace nearly gasped aloud at the very idea of her little girl setting out into the night in this foreign place to check out what had set off an alarm of any kind. She wasn’t real thrilled about the idea of doing it herself, although she would if she had to.
But she held her tongue for the moment. She and Marly had at last reached a tentative truce last night, after Grace had been as honest as she thought she could be with the girl. And more honest than she’d wanted to be; the urge to protect was very strong. She didn’t want to blow that peace now, but there was no way she was letting the girl outside until she knew it was safe.
Which also meant she herself was going to have to stay inside, because if somebody with malicious intent had indeed tripped that wire, she wouldn’t leave Marly here by herself.
“Mom? Shouldn’t we see what set it off?”
“Mr. Draven’s already check—”
She broke off as the sound of the earsplitting claxon halted abruptly. The silence seemed almost eerie after the volume of the noise. She looked at Marly.
“Do they shut off automatically?”
The girl frowned. “I’m not sure. But I don’t think so. The wire pulls out a pin, and that sets it off. I think you have to put the pin back in to shut it off.”
Which meant that Draven—or somebody—had gotten to where the alarmed trip wire was.
“We’d better go,” Marly said. “He’s all by himself. If it really is the bad guy, he could get hurt.”
“So could you,” Grace pointed out, although she was a little concerned herself at the uninterrupted silence.
She told herself firmly that it would take a lot more than one bad guy to seriously hurt John Draven. He’d been a legend at Redstone for longer than she’d been there. His exploits were common knowledge, and he was one of the first things she’d heard about when she’d started her job.
And after the earthquake, she hadn’t been at all surprised to learn that the man who had pulled her out, the dark, intense, scarred man who had maimed her in the process of saving her, was the legendary Draven.
“Mom!” Marly said, “you promised not to be so overprotective.”
“Stopping you from going out after a possible saboteur who’s also possibly armed is hardly being overprotective,” Grace said sternly.
“But—”
Grace held up a hand. “Let me get my foot squared away, and if he’s not back by then, I’ll reconsider.”
The girl agreed, reluctantly. So reluctantly that Grace left the bedroom door open as she prepared, so she could hear if her daughter gave in to temptation and the door opened. She dressed quickly, then started on the foot, forgoing the lengthier preparations of lotion and powder in the interest of speed. As time ticked on with no sign of Draven returning, she was getting anxious herself. Or else she was catching Marly’s eagerness.
Finished with the foot, she slipped on her other shoe, then stood up, grabbed the flashlight she’d nearly beaned Draven with and headed back into the living room where Marly was impatiently waiting by the door. The moment she saw Grace she reached for the knob.
It turned and the door swung open before she ever touched it. Marly gave a startled exclamation and jumped back. Grace’s hand tightened on the flashlight and she started to raise it and step forward.
Draven stepped into the room. In a split second he seemed to assess their relative positions and actions. Grace thought she saw something glitter in his eyes when he looked at her flashlight. But then his gaze settled on Marly. Steadily. Unwaveringly.
“Going somewhere?”
“Mom wouldn’t let me go see if you needed help,” the girl complained.
“Good,” he said.
Marly flushed. She whirled away and flounced down on the rumpled sofa bed. “Fine,” she muttered, clearly stung by his words.
Grace thought she heard him draw in a breath. Was dealing with Marly getting to him? When he spoke, his voice was kinder than she had expected.
And it was a complete sentence.
“I need to know if I see someone out there at this hour it’s not one of us.”
Marly looked up at that. “Oh. Okay, I get it. You don’t want to shoot the wrong person.”
Another breath. “I don’t want to shoot anyone.”
“Oh.” She sounded almost disappointed. After a moment she asked, “What set it off?”
“Your furry buddy.”
“What?” Marly frowned, then grinned. “The monkey?”
“None other.”
“So this was one of those false alarms you were telling me about?”
“So it seems.”
“Well, darn it. I was hoping we’d finally caught the bad guy.”
“Me, too,” Draven said, making Marly’s grin widen.
“Maybe next time,” she said, and this time Grace almost grinned at the unsubtle encouraging note in her daughter’s voice.
“Maybe.” Draven’s voice was solemn, and Grace liked him for not laughing.
This time when she went back to bed, Grace expected to be too wound up to sleep. But instead, as if that burst of energy expended when the alarm had sounded had taken the edge off, she was out within moments of her head hitting the pillow. She slipped quickly into a deep sleep, dreamt vividly about things that made no sense but mostly involved the man who had haunted her dreams for months now.
She became restless in the middle of one of these dreams, one in which they’d been alone, and instead of falling the towel she’d had wrapped around her after her shower had simply dissolved into thin air, leaving her breasts bared to a pair of masculine green eyes that, in her deluded state, turned hot with desire. So hot that instead of lifting her hands to cover herself, she straightened her posture, arching her back slightly, as if in the dream she wanted to thrust her breasts toward him. Offer them.
When the trip wire alarm blasted her awake again, she woke up with a cry. She told herself it was merely being startled out of sleep, but some part of her felt a sense of loss that the dream had ended, at that moment.
That realization rattled her so much that it took her a moment to focus on what was happening outside her too-erotic dreamworld.
Be glad it ended before the rejection, she thought, and forced herself to concentrate on reality.
Had she heard Draven leaving the roof again? She couldn’t be sure; she’d been too soundly asleep and too slow to wake up to know if she’d heard those sounds again. But she knew Marly would be awake again, and she wasn’t confident enough that Draven’s words had taken to simply trust her not to do anything foolish.
Once more she got up and put herself back together, telling herself that she was going to start sleeping with the prosthetic foot on if this kept up.
And dressed, she added to herself as she pulled off her sleep shirt, which reminded her of the dream and sent a fierce blast of heat through her that made her sway slightly. Her nipples tightened at the memory of that vivid image, and she ached in a way she never had before.
It scared her, and she made herself hurry to finish and get out to Marly.
The girl was huddled by the door, but she hadn’t gone out. She glanced up as her mother came in.
“Bet it’s the monkey again,” Marly said.
“Most likely,” Grace agreed; at t
his point she’d go along with anything that would keep the girl safely inside the motor home.
They hovered near the door, wondering what was going on out there. And Grace had to admit she didn’t like sitting back and waiting for the big, strong man to handle this. It wasn’t in her nature. She was an expert in a field that was dominated by men, and while she always tried to get along, she had never deferred to them.
Unless, of course, they knew more than she did. She was confident, but not stupid.
And Draven, she thought, knew a heck of a lot more about what to do out there than she would ever know. More than she ever wanted to know.
Once she remembered that, she felt herself calm slightly. He was the expert, and by all accounts one of the best in the world at what he did. He would handle this, and he didn’t need any help from her, and he certainly didn’t need any interference from a teenage girl. His job was to protect the project, and by circumstance he’d gotten pulled into protecting them as well. So while he was doing the first, the least she could do was help with the second.
“Boy, he’s not getting much sleep tonight, is he?”
Grace looked at her daughter. “No. No, he’s not.”
In fact, now that she thought about it, he probably hadn’t gotten much rest since he’d been here. She knew he spent a lot of the night watching the surveillance monitors, so he was starting out at a loss. When he did sleep, at first he’d been in the construction trailer, on the floor. Then on the roof of the trailer, and now on the roof of the motor home. Hardly conducive to sound sleep.
Of course, that was probably why he was doing it. She’d bet he didn’t want to get too comfortable, for fear he’d miss something, some sound, or movement, or like the other night, the smell of danger.
“Mom?”
She snapped out of her reverie and looked at her daughter. “What?”
“Did you know him before he came here?”
Grace tensed. She’d never told her daughter exactly what had happened during and after the earthquake. Marly had been staying with Grace’s aunt Charlotte during that time, since Grace hadn’t wanted to take her to a part of the world that wasn’t the most stable. So by the time Redstone had flown her home to the States, she’d buried the incident in her mind while she concentrated on her rehab.
She looked at the girl, who met her gaze steadily. Grace remembered her daughter’s plea to be told the truth, remembered that she’d had some very good reasons for it.
Perhaps she had a right to know this, as well.
“Mr. Draven is the man who pulled me out of that building after the earthquake.”
Marly’s eyes widened and her mouth opened in shock. “He’s the guy? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I try not to think about it very often,” Grace said. It was the honest truth; until Draven had shown up here she spent a great deal—probably too much—of her energy every day not thinking about it.
And then he’d arrived, and it had become impossible. His presence was just too big, too much, she simply couldn’t ignore him. He took up too much space, too much air.
He was too…too, she thought.
“Well, yeah,” Marly said, “but, jeez, I wish I’d known.”
“Why?” she asked, curious.
“I woulda been nicer, maybe.”
Well, hallelujah, Grace thought.
“How come he’s not friendlier to you?” Marly asked.
“I don’t know. I think that’s just the way he is, that’s his nature.” She thought about it a moment, then wondered aloud, “Or maybe not. I suppose it’s possible that I’m not a very enjoyable memory for him, either.”
“Why? I’d think saving somebody’s life would make you feel good.”
“I’m sure it does. But in some cases there’s a downside, too. Sometimes to save someone you have to do things that aren’t pleasant.”
Marly frowned. “You mean your foot? But why would that bother him? I mean, if he got you out in time, before the building—” The girl stopped suddenly, and her eyes got huge once again. “Oh, wow. Your foot…”
Grace looked at her, not denying or confirming the implication, wondering if there was a way to continue to avoid this.
“He did it?” Marly asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “He cut it off, right there?”
Grace sighed. She’d never told the girl, knew she’d always assumed her foot had had to be amputated later on in the hospital. She hadn’t felt it necessary to correct that impression, in fact had chosen not to, to avoid giving the child any more nightmares than she was already having. But now she didn’t seem to have any choice; it was the truth or a face-to-face lie.
“There was no choice. It was the only way to get me out in time. He knew the building was about to collapse. That we had only minutes. Maybe seconds.”
Marly shivered as she stared at her mother.
Now that she’d started, Grace decided she might as well finish. “He risked his own life. He would have been killed, too, if that building had come down. But he stayed, to get me out.”
“No wonder you seem so twitchy around him. Now I understand.”
You only think you do, Grace thought, fighting down the rush of color that threatened to flood her face as the memory of her dreams came back to her when Marly said the word twitchy. That was a good description of it. She was twitchy, all right, but it had nothing to do with her foot. And everything to do with the man who had separated her from it.
She told herself it was only natural, to feel, or imagine you felt, some sort of attraction to the man who’d saved your life. That’s all it was.
“And now I understand why he’s so weird around you,” Marly said.
Grace fought down the wave of aching sensation and focused on her daughter. “What?”
“He must really feel like crap, having to do that to you.”
Grace was so startled by the idea her daughter expressed that she neglected to object to the language. She had never thought of that, never thought it was even possible. Draven seemed so invulnerable, impervious to the frailties that plagued ordinary mortals.
She couldn’t believe that, however bloody and awful what he’d done to her might have been, that he hadn’t seen and done worse in his years with Redstone, or with the military before that. Something had to have put that look in his eyes, the look that chilled even the coldest of souls. You didn’t get that way by growing daffodils.
“I sort of doubt he feels that badly about it,” she said. “As I said, there was no choice.”
“I’ll bet he does,” Marly insisted. “I bet it gives him nightmares, just like us.”
Grace tilted her head to look at Marly. “You still have nightmares?”
That shrug again. And an embarrassed expression as she muttered, “Sometimes.”
The girl had never admitted to that before. Grace was fairly certain she’d had some nasty dreams, as she herself had, after she’d first arrived home. Too many times she’d found the girl up walking around at odd hours of the night. And her bed had been a tangled wreck in the mornings, as if she had tossed and turned all night.
But Marly had always denied it, insisted she was fine, with that affected, blasé attitude of the young teenager. Grace hadn’t believed it at the time, and had kept watching her daughter carefully. The nighttime excursions and restlessness seemed to have eased as time passed, but still—
This time it wasn’t the alarm that split the nighttime quiet.
It was a shot.
Chapter 13
He didn’t come back.
Grace stared at the door as if she could make it swing open by sheer force of will.
“Mom?”
Marly was sounding more upset with every query. But she couldn’t leave the girl alone, not with somebody out there with a gun.
Of course, it could have been Draven, shooting. Despite his comment to Marly about not wanting to shoot anyone, she was certain he would do whatever was necessary. She was a little surprised
at how much faith she had in that, but there it was. She supposed all that telling herself he had the reputation he had for a reason had finally sunk in.
“It’s his job, Marly. He’s the expert.”
“What good does that do if somebody gets the drop on him?”
At the phrase Grace reminded herself to more carefully monitor her daughter’s choices in entertainment.
“Being the expert is what keeps that from happening,” she said.
“But what if that shot was at him? Like…like a…a sniper or something!” Marly, not having her mother’s knowledge of who and what Draven was, asked anxiously. “What if he’s out there hurt, bleeding, maybe even dying?”
Grace had to admit her daughter’s frightened words sent some ugly images through her head. But she couldn’t quite wrap her mind around the idea of the mighty John Draven being taken down like that.
But, once again she had a point. The bad guys could always get lucky, she thought. It happened. Cops got shot all the time, even with all their training.
“Mom, come on!” Marly was nearly shouting now.
“You heard what he said,” Grace said, afraid the girl was going to bolt in a moment. “He has to know anybody moving is the bad guy.”
“You think half the crew isn’t out there after hearing a shot?”
Grace stared at her daughter. When had she gotten so logical? And when had she herself apparently lost the capacity to think clearly? At least, when it came to Draven.
Probably the moment he stepped off that plane, she muttered inwardly.
“You’re right,” she said aloud, earning a flash of a smile from Marly. “But we’re going to stay in the main quad until we find out what’s going on. No straying out to the edge, even though that’s where the trip wires are. All right?”
Marly hesitated, but then nodded.
She had been right, Grace realized, soon after they stepped outside. Several outside lights were now on, in addition to the high-intensity spots over the heavy equipment enclosure that were always on all night. And she could see men moving in and out of the pools of light.
“Over there,” Grace said, pointing to where a silhouette against the brighter lights appeared to be Nick. “Let’s go see what he knows.”
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